The Sun in Your Eyes (10 page)

“Oh, my dear, sometimes I regret that I never went in for all that Emily Post stuff. I think I did us both a disservice.”

“I know what you mean,” said my mother. “I wasn't very good about making my kids write thank-you notes and it haunts us to this day.” A lie. I'd never witnessed my mother lie like that, and it threw me. Not just because she was lying (she was on me about thank-you notes as soon as I could properly hold a pen), but because the lie effectively did so much work, expressing sympathy for Linda but ultimately defending Lee, and at my expense. I couldn't immediately name the feeling that crept up on me, but on reflection, it seemed a lot like jealousy. I wanted my mother's affection for myself.

“Lee is her father's daughter,” said Linda. “She's gonna do what she's gonna do.” Ostensibly celebrating something irrepressible in Lee, Linda's comment had an ugly undertone that seemed aimed at the table, a warning to all of us when it came to taking sides.

“Yes,” said Lee, “and right now I'm gonna get that waiter back here and order another bottle of wine.”

U
NDER A CANOPY
of trees the dirt lane from Flintwick's compound led to a paved, sleepy road. We passed a barn and yellow and green fields that soon dipped down into a darker, cooler valley, shaded from the disappearing sun by the tall, dense pines of the Catskill preserve. Brown signs etched with yellow paint marked turnoffs for a campground, a waterfall, the trail head for a hike, until
the forest cover thinned out again and we came to the two-lane route we'd taken in. Instead of turning right, which would take us back the way we came, Lee went left along the winding mountain road. Some scenic detour, I figured, to keep things going before we headed back to the city. She'd promised me a road trip, and I didn't want to go home yet.

In the passenger seat, I leafed through a scrapbook Lee had been given by her aunt Delia, whom she'd gone to see in North Carolina a few months earlier on a fact-finding mission. Press clippings from a local paper and a copy of a page from his 1965 high-school yearbook picturing Jesse perched on a stool with his guitar, clean-cut in permanent-press pants and a crisp-collared, button-down shirt under a sport coat, his hair still short enough to be corralled into a stiff side sweep off his forehead. The caption beneath the photo:
Jesse Parrish never fails to entertain!

“Delia told me that in his first band at boarding school, they played a dance at the girls' academy nearby. His guitar went missing afterward and the headmistress found it a week later in one of the girl's beds. He drove her to theft.”

“But he stole her heart.”

“It's possible Delia made that story up. She's sort of lucid and sort of bonkers. But I don't know. Have you read the letter yet?”

Tucked in there was an envelope postmarked Los Angeles, May 27, 1970, containing this:

I had never seen a letter of Jesse's and I didn't know why but out of all of it—the description of his wedding to Linda, his acute, knowing read of Patti Driggs—it was that “Gosh” of his that really brought him to life for me.

“Oh, I know,” said Lee. “You should hear Aunt Delia talk. It's all ‘Gosh!' and ‘Golly!' It's like no matter how fucked up things got, she never stopped being a well-mannered Southern belle. Maybe that's what's fucked up about her.”

“How is she fucked up, exactly?”

“Pretty much like the rest of the Parrishes were. In and out of places since she was seventeen. Substance abuse. Depression. Manic depression. They were all alcoholics, you know, on Jesse's mother's side. It's kind of unbelievable. Like it's almost too on the nose or something. I knew my father's father shot himself when my dad was a kid. But I didn't know how Southern Gothic it all was. Do you know what the family did? They had a party. Every year his mother's mother threw herself a lavish birthday celebration at their home. But by home I mean mansion. This big white house on a lake among the pine trees. They would put up a tent for the evening—all elegant. So my grandfather kills himself and my great-grandmother just goes ahead and has her party as planned. Jesse and Delia were out there in their finest, watching everyone, their mother included, get progressively more hammered, until one of the servants came to take them inside to get ready for bed. Delia told me she and my dad didn't know it was suicide until they were grown. Hunting accident, they were told. Delia is the only one left now. I never met any of the others. It doesn't even seem real to me. But sometimes my father barely seems real to me. Which I guess is the whole point of this, right?”

She pulled over and though no official signage marked the spot where we'd stopped, it was obvious where we were.

“How did you know where this was?” I asked.

“Educated guess.”

The shoulder began again after dropping off precipitously. To the right, the road bordered a high wall of blasted rock. To the left and behind us, a guardrail curved along a steep ravine above the stream into which Jesse Parrish's car had fallen. Over the years his fans had consecrated the site with flowers and plaques and a bulletin board erected between two trees on which were affixed poems, letters, and laminated drawings. Among the least weather-beaten additions were an original sketch of Jesse ascending to heaven on a rainbow, and a charcoal drawing of Jesse snuggling two kittens, signed “with love from Angie,” a passport-size picture of the artist attached. Angie looked to be about forty-five.

The shrine was both touching and embarrassing. People had loved him so much, and still did, but it was an adolescent love, narcissistic and showy. It was hard not think that the love reduced and diminished its object, and the object of worship wasn't magnificent enough to withstand kittens and middle age.

“I've seen this place in pictures and I never thought I'd care to see it in person,” said Lee. “In Paris once, I was walking through the Montparnasse cemetery, just to walk through it, and I saw Serge Gainsbourg's grave. It had all these metro tickets on it and packs of Gitanes that people brought. A couple of heads of cabbage because of that song he wrote. It was kind of lively, celebratory. But this place always just seemed mawkish. Why do people do this? Maybe it's because my dad doesn't have a grave. But people go out to the desert, too, where Linda scattered his ashes. It's strange. I feel like there's this character Linda West, and then there's my mother, the
real person I know. As real as you can get. With my father, though, I have only what everyone else has. These people, Angie or whoever, these people know him better than I do.”

“That's not true.”

“I have a few memories. I have ‘Yours.' But even that's not really mine.” The waltz-like song Jesse had written for Lee had become a commonplace father-daughter dance at a certain kind of wedding—the wedding that didn't want to be a wedding but was a wedding nonetheless. I always figured Lee had her own interpretation of the lyrics “you and the sun and the sun in your eyes.” But here it was, represented rather literally—a big sun in place of a pupil in a folkarty painting embellished with glitter glue and coated in shellac. Craning for a closer look, I lost my balance and started to slip down the incline before scrambling up. The patch of ground was precarious, falling off sharply, a testament of devotion on the part of the memorial pilgrims.

Lee saw me stumble and quickly moved to help me to my feet. We stood there, gazing down. There's no good ravine to accidentally take a header into, but this one was especially dicey and unforgiving. If you were looking for an out, it would likely get the job done. Lee had never told me what she thought about the crash, if she believed it was an accident or if she thought her father had purposefully pulled the steering wheel hard to the left and accelerated. Like his father, in spirit, before him. In any case, there was no question he was intoxicated.

Maybe we were thinking the same thing.

“I do have his genes, though. It's encoded in me.”

“You can't think that way. You aren't your father.”

“I'm not saying I'm going to kill myself, Viv. If that's even what he did. The tapes are like a big hole. I don't know what they would
fill in, but something. In all the shit you can read about my dad, they talk about his breakdown like it was this isolated thing. They never really talk about him struggling with an undiagnosed illness. But you can't meet Delia and come away thinking he was fine, fine, fine, then lost it one day, and then was fine again. I don't want to romanticize it, but I want to feel closer to his experience of it, to know if my experience is anything like his. Because those tendencies certainly don't come from Linda. I doubt she's ever been down—like, really down—a day in her life.”

“You're okay now though, right?”

“I can fucking get up in the morning. But then I wonder what I'm doing with my life. It sucks when you've aged out of the time when it's still socially acceptable not to have things figured out.”

“And you haven't yet reached the age when it's socially acceptable that whatever you thought you had figured out starts to unravel.” I thought I should have at least another ten years before it was time for a midlife crisis, though it seemed to me that “midlife” and “crisis” were increasingly slippery terms.

“I just have this sense that I've squandered my legacy. That I should have been a lot more than I am. But what was my inheritance? Beauty? Sex appeal? That doesn't promise much. Maybe my dad had it right. Like, burning out is better than fading away or whatever.”

“Lee.”

“What?”

“I don't think those are the only options.”

“Maybe not,” she trailed off, laced her fingers together on the crown of her head, her elbows wide, as if to survey her domain, and then picked up again. “Don't get grossed out.”

“About?”

“I had this dream once. One of those strange, long-finish dreams
that cast a shadow on the whole day when you wake up. I was at a house by a lake and there were people there that I seemed to know. I walked down this carpeted hall and there was this row of doors made of plywood and I opened one to a room with a bed. It was all pink and gold. This young guy, in jeans and one of those three-quarter-length baseball shirts, hair like my father, came in and I knew something was going to happen and I was excited but I also had a sense of doom. I wanted something from him. I wanted him to be interested in me. We were on the bed and our actions started to look like a slow series of photographs. I held his head in my hands. He lifted my shirt and pressed his face to my stomach. Then like a slide show our position would change. I felt so close to him. He said he had to tell me something, and I knew what it was, and also that it didn't matter, that I wanted to stay in that room with him. So yeah, I woke up and I was like, fuck, I'm just like Linda, dreaming about my father.”

“I guess everyone has dreams like that.”

“Have you?”

“Well, no, not with my own dad.” Lee ground her gaze into a leaf pile and I tried to keep myself from fully registering the awkwardness of the moment. “But I once had a dream about Michael Landon. As Pa from
Little House on the Prairie.
Does that count?”

“Yes, I'll accept it.” She sighed. “Let's get out of here.”

“Where do you want to go? With this.” Gesturing down at the ravine.

She wanted to find a place for the night, talk to Bill Carnahan in the morning. But she didn't want me to feel obligated to help, in my condition and all. I told her it wasn't much of a condition yet. Then I texted Andy:
Here for the night. Will check back soon.
No immediate response. Was he away from his phone? Or was it a calculated silence? What was the calculation?

In the car, in search of a motel, we passed the rusted but still-standing L-shaped sign heralding, in a pointy, peaked font, Hirschman's. The deteriorating resort of Linda's youth. Lee pulled off the road again and onto an overgrown drive that met with a high chain-link fence through which we could see the falling-in red roofs of three large buildings, the vestiges of an extinct way of vacationing.